Theme Thursday: ICS for CM7

As with a few past Theme Thursdays we will be looking at themes for the most popular ROM for rooted Android phones and that is CyanogenMod. Most people who run CyanogenMod use it because they want something that their current phone does not give them, and for a majority of people that reason is Ice Cream Sandwich. Because phone carriers are so reluctant to upgrade even year old phones to Google’s newer OS, a good amount of these owners have looked to rooting in order to get their phones looking the way they want. I personally have a love/hate relationship with ICS; I enjoy everything right up to the icons. Ice Cream Sandwich’s thin lines and dark complexion are very attractive but I feel the bright and oversized icons to be out of place.

Well never mind what I think because I feel that I am probably in the minority here and the questionable icons have not stopped me from getting an ICS theme for my CM7. There are a few ICS themes for CM7, and I have tried a few but my favorite by far has to be the one by Sonny Sekhon, who has a large and impressive list of CyanogenMod themes. Like most themes there are not much performance tweaks and everything about the phone remains CM7 except it just looks better, and wow it does look better. The developer does a great job of making sure that everything here was themed correctly and after looking at my friend’s ICS phone I found it hard to tell many differences in the way the phones looked.

CyanogenMod 9 comes with its own proprietary launcher, Trebuchet, but CM7 still uses ADW Launcher to handle the home screen. Unfortunately, this app does not have a corresponding ADW Launcher theme but it does have one for LauncherPro. I find this kind of weird and I do not usually like having multiple launchers on my phone as I feel it bogs the home screen down for some reason, but ultimately it is not a deal breaker as the launcher skin looks great as well.

So anyone who has a rooted phone with CyanogenMod 7 I highly recommend looking into grabbing Sonny Sekhon’s Ice Cream Sandwich theme and give that “aging” phone a breath of life.

Joseph Bertolini

Joseph is an Mechanical Engineering student at The Ohio State University as well as an amateur photographer.